Anyone been to China? Tips please

[WindsorHillsPad]

I am walking along the Great Wall of China in May and I am looking for the do's and don'ts in China please. Also what should I look out for at the shops.

Thanks

[NAGS]

Shopping-wise, you'll probably see lots of jade products. Like most things though it's good if you have someone with you that can distinguish between fakes and the real thing .....

I'm not very keen on trying different foods, but have tried snake, if you get the chance I'd recommend trying it.

Cheers

[miler]

You will need a visa . you have to send off your passport and have the visa added , there are companies that will do this for you for around £ 90 pp, If you are fussy with your food I would take some packet soups , biscuits etc , you can find KFC , McD etc but the food can be quite grim , keep hold of your purse , wallet , as there are pick pockets around , dont give the beggars anything as where there is one there is usually more .

[ju_itfc]

Ah China, my Wife spent two weeks out of a 9 month round the world trip in the country in 2006.

Firstly I hope your experience of the Great Wall is better than ours. On the day we visited (with an overland tour group) it was so foggy you couldn't see your hand in front of you. I don't exaggerate either. It was a complete and utter disaster, and humid as hell, so much so that I had to throw out the t-shirt I was wearing that day. There are various sections of the wall for visitors to visit, I cannot for the life of me remember the name of our section but unsuprisingly it was very touristy with plenty of stalls selling "wall" souvenirs etc. One of the best parts of the touristy hardsell is the "fake" t-shirts, buy 1 get 4 free I think was the best offer. Rubbish quality but plenty good enough to wear for a few days and throw out.

Beijing was a huge disappointment to us. It is very industrial and was also very humid and muggy when we went. Tianemen Square is good to look at, as is the Forbidden City but I felt just a little let down. It didn't help that two of our group were scammed on their visits to the Square. Be aware of any chinese students with excellent English offering to take you to a tea ceremony. It sounds fairly obvious, but the two people we were with were duped, and would have lost a lot of money but for paying on their credit cards (the amounts were stopped prior to the transaction completing). I think one amount was for over £200. Needless to say when they refused to pay whilst at the ceremony, a number of "heavies" arrived and ensured they paid up. Not a pleasant experience as I am sure you can imagine.

The one thing that really disappointed about China was the constant need to try and rip tourists off. We borrowed umbrellas from a hotel one day and didn't utilise them as the weather improved. On our return the hotel insisted we had damaged them and refused to hand over our deposit. Any damage to the umbrellas had already been done before, but they would not have given us our deposit back but for the insistence of our tour leader threatening to take the groups business elsehwhere. I could go on with the scams/rip offs but I think you get my point.

Highlights. Ok, Xian the city itself is amazing, very nice. Walk the walls around the city. The Terracotta Warriors were neat but once again, we were not blown away. I think one fault of this might have been the visit to the Angkor Temples in Cambodia prior to China which totally blew us away and everything else seemed to just be not as good. Well worth a visit, but not the wonder of the world they are marketed as.

We also went to Suzhou, a nice little city but with a very "interesting" nightlife and finished up in Shanghai, which is very modern China and very very good.

Food was pretty good to be honest. As others have stated there is not a lot of western style restaurants available, although you can get McDonalds and KFC. As we were with a group the tour leader had some good recommendations, and I must admit although I didn't see eye to eye with him on a few occasions, his choices were top class and very very cheap. I think the cheapest place we managed to get a large beer was 5 yuan, which is really cheap as you can probably imagine.

I wouldn't say that China was our favourite part of our RTW trip, far from it, but there is enough of interest for tourists. The constant rip offs and scams became a little too much to be honest and left a sour taste for a lot of our tour group. Shanghai was a huge highlight for us, Beijing was probably the biggest disappointment in 9 months away.

Have fun.